The Oldest Story

...The Ginzburg family was partly Jewish, on the father's side, and this may account for its intellectual interests...

...It is magical, exhilirating...

...In order to bear somebody like Natalia's father, with his petulance, his suspiciousness, his overweening demands, his quirks and intolerable idiosyncrasies, one must have a structure into which he can be fit—the privacy, and what Marx called "the idiocy," of family life...

...She has boldly accepted the Arcadian in her experience —which is her family story—and transformed it into that mythical atmosphere Pavese tried to create by skirting or repressing his own family "romance," using that word both in its Freudian and ordinary senses...

...I regret the loss, above all because I see history without any check or balance once the intimate, closed world of the family has been laid in ruins...

...Natalia Ginzburg learned the modern lesson of immediacy and simplicity from her colleague Cesare Pavese, who in turn learned it from Gertrude Stein, Mark Twain and Sherwood Anderson—all of whom he had translated into Italian during the years of his literary apprenticeship...

...There is not a shadow of it in his books, and the only place one could look for it was in the flash of his mischievous smile...

...But what we are faced with is the material of everyday existence...

...Her father is, as I said, the counter-muse...

...Natalia Ginzburg obviously loved and feared Pavese, and her book always has his example in mind, using it in the free-moving, conversational surface of the prose while defying it in the "poetic" exploitation of the ironically viewed materials of family life...

...Inevitably the advice and appeals that reach us from outside come from an experience already discounted, they reflect a theme and taste that already exists...

...the reiterated jokes, the passwords, the silly anecdotes, the curious tags of memory and reminiscence, all the frivolous baggage that a family collects...

...Thus today, after one makes all due allowances for the impact of outside influences, the novels of Pavese and Natalia Ginzburg seem to fit into an old Italian tradition that goes back to Boccaccio and reaches its modern apotheosis in Giovanni Verga: direct prose founded on the rhythms of everyday speech, which have been lifted to a new, revelatory level by the artist's ability to mold, pattern and select...

...The surface of this book is also its depths...

...England, Zola's novels, the Rockefeller Foundation, mountains and the guides of the Val d'Aosta...

...In doing so, they turned their backs on the artistic prose that had been nurtured so prudently, so elegantly, under the repressive shadow of Fascism...

...Each reader will have to decide for himself whether he regrets this loss or is grateful for an open society in which such situations have become virtually impossible...

...This is by now a thing so carnally interior to him as the foetus in the uterus...

...At times when I think of him now, this irony is what I most remember in him and mourn, for he is no longer living...

...To put it briefly, the doctrinal, practical advice can only tend to push the poet into literature, to prevent him from carrying out his specific task as the conquistador of an unknown land...

...Too long in the neck.' . . . Many of her memories were like that —simple phrases that she had heard...

...Simple phrases that she had heard...

...Friendship was in him a natural feeling, and in some casual way was a matter to which he did not attach excessive importance...

...It is gone, or almost gone, and so Natalia's portrait of her father, with all its venom and love, takes on a kind of historical character, an Arcadian remoteness...

...Iam talking about the world at large, of course, because in Italy the blessings of backwardness confer on Italians the delights and discomforts of a family life that more advanced countries have already liquidated...

...To Pavese, who was her mentor for many years, poetry in the novel could only be a thrust into new, undiscovered territory...

...Books are written in a dialogue with all of literature, but most of all in a dialogue with one's own loved and feared contemporaries...

...Her father was eccentric, but her mother was absolutely delightful...

...Pavese went on: "The ecstasy or tangle into which his eyes probe must be all contained in his heart, and filtered through it with those imperceptible processes that go back at least to his adolescence, as in the slow gathering of salts and juices from which they say mushrooms are born...

...This gives the story its essential cadence, its homely rhythm...

...The final irony is that Pavese, Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson have helped Natalia Ginzburg write the book which all of them, in their various ways, were unable to write: the story of small, private lives against the vast backdrop of history...

...he is also an enormous gift to any writer, one of those extravagant, roaring, hateful and lovable tyrants who could only exist in a closed Victorian atmosphere...

...This book is made up of them, and by a magic of art those simple phrases compose a whole destiny, give us what Pavese called "the rhythm of what happened," while also telling us the poignant, absurd, terrible story of a family and a generation that came through the War and managed to preserve something from the ruins...

...Gradually, as we proceed through the annoyances and degradations of Fascism (the book begins shortly before Mussolini came to power), the terrors of war and Jewish persecution, the escapades and adventures and heartbreaks of the Resistance, what started as a simple family chronicle takes on the timeless, magnificent aspect of an ancient tale, a Homeric saga...

...In the last pages, after all is accomplished and the deaths, the bereavements, the terrible losses of war and social struggle have been counted up, so to speak, the mere fact that Natalia's mother is still telling the same old stories, and that her father—the counter-muse, the rationalistic ogre—is still there to provide the antiphonic accompaniment of grumbles and complaints, becomes mythical in the truest sense...

...It was only in his friendships that he showed it...

...Nothing pre-existent, no exterior, practical authority can therefore help or guide him in the discovery of this new land...

...Natalia Ginzburg's book seems to me the masterpiece of this school, although its essential aim is a compromise on the whole question of the nature of poetry...

...But there is an irony here, for the novels of Pavese and Natalia Ginzburg are just as "artistic" and estheti-cally conscious as the works they rejected...

...He flung himself into his love affairs and his writing in such a feverish and, at the same time, deliberate state of mind that he could never laugh and could never be entirely himself...

...Cultural cross-breedings are a suggestive and illuminating subject, and perhaps none is more exciting in contemporary literature than the story of the re-birth of Italian writing after World War II under the influence of modern American prose fiction...

...The father was a Socialist of the old school...

...History is always in the background, ready to explode and disrupt the established patterns and time-consecrated relationships...

...The only difference is that they set out to deal with material that the former generation of writers avoided because it was forbidden politically...

...I have quoted all this to show what Natalia Ginzburg was up against, what she had to fight to be able to achieve her own voice, her own approach to existence...

...Yet this modest book, which inducts us into the heart of historical tragedy through the simplest means, may do more to instruct us in the real significance of that tragedy than many more sensational works...

...In his [Pavese's] relations with us, his friends, he displayed at all times a deep vein of irony, with which he used to discuss and study us...

...Bad novels—that is, un-poetic novels—were written out of a routine, and the novelist, he said, "pretends to himself not to know what he already knows...

...One day when she was a little girl, walking in Milan, she had seen a gentleman with his chest thrown out standing motionless before a hairdresser's window, gazing at one of the wax heads and saying to himself: 'Lovely, lovely...

...The young people who had been immured in the provinciality of Fascism's cultural autarchy turned quite naturally to the daring, the open spaces, the continental sweep which American writing seemed to them to typify...

...The things my mother cared for were: Socialism, Paul Verlaine's poems, and music, particularly Lohengrin, from which she used to sing something in the evenings after supper...

...A professor of anatomy, he "thought highly of . . . Socialism...

...I continue to feel that Americans, who really know these experiences only at second hand, can never fully participate in them...

...Her criticism of Pavese, since he is one of the characters in her story, tells us obliquely what she meant to achieve in her book...

...This irony was one of the nicest things about him, yet he never exercised it over the matters which were nearest to his heart, never in his relations with the women he was in love with nor in his books...

...Put in another way, it establishes Arcadia...

...Now that family life of this sort is being crushed out by the forces of modern existence, such characters will disappear from reality and fiction...

...It is indeed the cadence of normality, and every time Natalia's mother—the true muse of this book—repeats one of her silly family yarns, she is also telling of human persistence and frivolity in the face of an utterly brutal and incommensurate history...

...P. Dutton, 225 pp., $5.75), is a simple chronicle of family life...

...The ideological constriction exercised on the act of poetry immediately transforms the leopards and eagles into domestic lambs and turkeys...